Aluminium boost for solid state lithium battery cell
Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed an aluminium foil that can boost the performance of solid state lithium battery cells.
The team, led by Matthew McDowell, associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Materials Science and Engineering, used the aluminium foil for a solid state battery cell with a higher energy density than today’s solid state cells.
“We are always looking for batteries with higher energy density, which would enable electric vehicles to drive for longer distances on a charge,” said McDowell said. “It’s interesting that we can use aluminium as a battery material, because it’s cost-effective, highly recyclable, and easy to work with.”
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When used in a conventional lithium-ion battery, aluminium fractures and fails within a few charge-discharge cycles, due to expansion and contraction as lithium travels in and out of the material. Now, solid state battery cells enable the integration of new high-performance active materials, as shown in this research.
The lithiation of aluminium can provide a theoretical specific capacity of 990 mAh/g but significantly with a volume change of 96%, lower than the 310% volume change of silicon anodes.
The project began as a collaboration between the Georgia Tech team and Novelis, a leading manufacturer of aluminium and the world’s largest aluminium recycler.
Pure aluminium foils fail rapidly when used as anodes in batteries so instead the team added small amounts of indium to create foils with particular microstructures. The team tested over 100 different versions to understand how the materials would behave in batteries.
“We needed to incorporate a material that would address aluminium’s fundamental issues as a battery anode,” said Yuhgene Liu, a Ph.D. student in McDowell’s lab and first author on the paper. “Our new aluminium foil anode demonstrated markedly improved performance and stability when implemented in solid-state batteries, as opposed to conventional lithium-ion batteries.”
The new foil can store more lithium than conventional anode materials, and therefore more energy. In the end, they had created high energy density batteries that could potentially outperform lithium-ion batteries.
“One of the benefits of our aluminium anode that we’re excited about is that it enables performance improvements, but it also can be very cost-effective,” said McDowell. “On top of that, when using a foil directly as a battery component, we actually remove a lot of the manufacturing steps that would normally be required to produce a battery material.”
“The initial success of these aluminium foil anodes presents a new direction for discovering other potential battery materials,” said Liu. “This hopefully opens pathways for reimagining a more energy-optimized and cost-effective battery cell architecture.”
The team is currently working to scale up the size of the batteries to understand how size influences the aluminium foil behaviour. The group is also actively exploring other materials and microstructures with the goal of creating very cheap foils for battery systems.
“This is a story about a material that was known about for a long time, but was largely abandoned early on in battery development,” McDowell said. “But with new knowledge, combined with a new technology — the solid-state battery — we’ve figured out how we can rejuvenate the idea and achieve really promising performance.”
doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-39685-x
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